This study examines the common pedagogical approaches of L2 Spanish textbooks that are currently used at the college-level in the United States, and investigates whether they embrace the notion of input as a key concept in aiding L2 learners in learning new vocabulary words through activities that guide them from input/comprehension to output/production in a meaningful way. The analysis revealed that the textbooks surveyed in this study overall exhibited the common organization and presentation of the new vocabulary words. Despite these apparent similarities of organization in presenting new vocabulary, the surveyed textbooks differed in the manner in which the input-based instruction and the output-based instruction were employed. More specifically, the activities found in the surveyed textbooks exhibited varying degrees of manipulation involved in both input and output-based tasks, and they also differed in the number of input-based and output-based activities as well as in the logical progression between the two types of activities. The findings of this study suggest that the surveyed textbooks showed a predominant tendency towards the output-based instruction of vocabulary, putting an emphasis on the production of new L2 vocabulary. This study provides further evidence that the input-based instruction, despite its effectiveness of teaching and learning L2 as demonstrated in many previous studies, is not systematically incorporated into most L2 textbooks, thus implying a gap between theory and practice.